In 2013 the total number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide surpassed the total population of our planet. “This is totally unprecedented in the human history of technology. No technology ever, has even come close. Not television sets, not PCs, not radios, not cars, not motorcycles, not even bicycles; not credit cards, not even bank accounts; not books in print, not newspaper circulations; not the reach of electricity or landline telephones or even running water; not wristwatches, not toothbrushes, not even pens and pencils… have been as widely used as mobile is today.” [Tomi Ahonen] This year the total number of smartphones worldwide will exceed the total number of PCs, of any kind, in the world. These mobile devices are mobile computers; they also serve as rich sensing platforms on the global scale. This talk will highlight some of the research work done in Nokia’s North America Lab on “Mobile Sensing and Social Services” and “Visual Computing and Mixed Reality,” and suggest some interesting directions for future research in the areas of “Human Behavior Modelling and Understanding” and “Global-Scale Mobile and Swarm Computing.”

John Paul Shen is a Nokia Fellow and the founding director of Nokia Research Center - North America Lab. NRC-NAL pursued a wide range of research projects in mobile Internet and mobile computing. In six years (2006-2012), NRC-NAL filed over 100 patents, published over 200 papers, hosted about 100 PhD interns, and collaborated with a dozen universities. Prior to joining Nokia in 2006, John was the Director of the Microarchitecture Research Lab at Intel. MRL had research teams in Santa Clara, Portland, and Austin, pursuing research in aggressive ILP & TLP microarchitectures for IA32 and IA64 processors. Prior to joining Intel in 2000, John was a tenured Full Professor in the ECE Department at CMU, where he supervised 17 PhD students and dozens of MS students, received multiple teaching awards, and published two books and more than 100 research papers. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the ECE Department at CMU, and teaching 18-640 “Foundations of Computer Architecture.”